Imran Ashraf joined RMT Direct Leads as a former SJP Partner in August 2013. In 2015, Imran spent £18,000 on Pension Appointments. These were sucessfully converted into £70-80,000 worth of fees, giving a ROI of 344%. Todate, Imran has sat 99 appointments and is only one away from his first century with RMT Direct Leads!

Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I have been in the financial advisory industry as an advisor for 10 years. At first honing my advisor skills and technical knowledge at HSBC bank, obtaining the prestigious Chartered Financial Planner status in 2012 and Fellowship status in 2015. In 2013 I decided to setup my own IFA practice and have not looked back since.

What areas do you cover?
I mainly cover the following areas:
London
Surrey
Hampshire
Berkshire

How did you hear about RMT Direct Leads?
Through a google search a number of years ago

What do you like about our service?
Low rate of no shows
Majority of appointments are high quality
Pay after successful appointment payment terms
The appointments go direct into my diary and you have live access to my diary. This prevents double bookings and a more streamlined service.

How much revenue on average do you generate per 10 appointments?
£15,000

What is your conversion rate for pension business?
80%

What is your conversion rate for other business?
25% on the back of these generated appointments

How do we compare to the competition?
I have tried a lot of lead generation companies and have wasted literally thousands of pounds. All of these other lead generation firms have come and gone, but I remain a loyal customer to RMT as they deliver the best and most consistent results.

How can we improve?
Reduce cancellation/re-scheduled appointments
Book more high value clients

…..So we asked some of our IFA Direct Home co-ordinators to listen to one of their recent calls where they attempted to make a pension appointment. The idea being to be as self critical as possible.

In summary, more questions and less babble is required at the IFA Direct call centre! (or Geordie babble for one member of staff)

Cringe!!!

The main point i noticed is i speak to much, keep saying basically and ok. The call was dragged out to long with someone who isn’t interested. Better questioning at the start would have saved half the call.

Jem
—————–The call was sh*t to put it bluntly. I think he threw me with his yes, no answers.No exaggeration of “millions” or “massively”.Explained charge percentages before gaining amount.No oomph – no personality. You have permission to slap me the next time I say Sir! I gave up too easily.

Lou
—————–Interesting to hear, a lot of skirting around the point (errrm’s) can see where I missed a few opportunities to close, too long and drawn out.

3. He told me at the beginning of the call that he was still paying into the PPP, but I asked him again towards the end of the call and I expressed great surprise, as if I didn’t know! It sounded insincere and I need to make more notes as I go along!!!

Changes I’ll implement immediately:

1. Emphasise the Keywords in the Hook

2. Much less talking by myself and cut out the ‘waffling’

3. Ask more open questions, to express a genuine interest

4. Hone my listening skills and make more notes as I go along

I feel this has been a great help to me and will ensure I introduce these changes immediately!

Incidentally, this one resulted in an appointment.

Peter
—————–

HiI listened and seems ok … he will have a review in new year… as he said too busy now and if I pushed it he would prob not bother at all… I could have sounded more up beat maybe…

Jacqueline
—————–

This call he had no idea who his pension was with only employer and he has no documents, informed him to through online gov site and trace pension as we cannot help until he know his info. Could have done this much quicker, call was possibly too customer service like.Said OK far too many times.

Jemma
—————–

I thought I was pretty good. Set up a good callback but he didn’t pick up phone. My fault as I rang at the wrong time. If anything I should have closed him instead of waffling about benefits too much.

The recent TalkTalk data hack and the very negative publicity that has lingered on during the month of October and November has reduced the number of booked pension appointments made during this period by 20%.

The last month has seen an increase in the ratio of calls to appointments made up from the past years average of 1 in 64 to 1 in 81 (appointment made that meets criteria versus calls made that are not interested).

The same period last year saw a ratio is 1 in 67, making it 20% more difficult. However, it has been higher than 1 in 81 in the past year. March broke the record at 1 in 95!

Strangely in March it was a record month for IFA Direct where it booked in excess of 200 appointments – perhaps a strange mixture of the anticipated pension reforms that were due to take place in April and the news that the ICO were to impose huge fines on firms who flout rules on direct marketing,

You can search on Google for trending words such as nuisance calls or cold call to gauge consumer sentiment . You can see in March and October that the number of searches for nuisance calls or cold calls spiked in response to the news.

In October the TalkTalk data hack news led to a spike on the 25-31 October 2015 at 100 (100 is the max during that period) for the term nuisance calls. However, a week later 1-7 November 2015 it was down to 55 a huge drop of 45%, looking like the news was already fading and past its peak.

RMT Direct was founded by Ryan Mellor and Charlotte Till and ‘RMT’ stands for Ryan Mellor Till.

RMT Direct started out from a small 2 bedroom apartment generating various outbound telemarketing campaigns to UK clients.

RMT Direct has grown to a 24 seat call centre and is now ranked #1 on Google UK for financial advice leads and IFA appointments and its aim is to be largest suppliers of IFA appointments in the UK.

RMT Direct currently generates in excess of 150+ IFA appointments every month and its latest creation due to be launched in Jan 2016, is a website that will be capable of generating 100 online leads per day. http://www.find-a-local-ifa.co.uk

In 2015, RMT Recruitment was formed and RMT Direct Ltd became RMT Group (UK) Ltd in the process. RMT Direct is now all but a web portal and attracts around 300 unique visitors every month from around 20,000 financial advisors that operate in the UK.

We asked our clients how fast we deliver our pension appointments. 75% of them gave us full marks – 100%, giving an overall rating of 4.75 out of 5 for speed of delivery.

Delivering the appointments fast and efficiently is however, pointless unless an IFA converts his or her pension appointments into actual business. 75% of our clients submitted 6 or pension cases out of 10 cases and a further 1.42 cases per 10 in other areas of financial advice.

Speaking to Imran Ashraff of Aspire Financial Management Ltd an IFA who has been a client with RMT Direct for 2 years, stated that last year he had spent some £18,000 on pension appointments. This investment generated a return of somewhere between £70-£80,000, a return on investment of 277%!

I asked Graham Thompson of Huntington Ross the same question. This was his response:

Hi Ryan,

Further to our telephone call earlier this week, please find below a quick testimonial of the RMT IFA Appointment service :-

Since I began taking appointments from RMT in 2014, I have had a steady supply of appointments relating mainly to pension reviews. Overall, I have been very happy with the quality of these appointments and they have been invaluable in helping to build up my client bank over the past year. Whilst the size of the pension pots vary considerably, I would say that on average, I generate around £10,000 to £15,000 worth of fees per 10 appointments (Costing around £3,500). With my last 10 appointments, I expect to write business generating something in the region of £13,000 in initial fees and many of these clients will go on to become long term clients, paying on-going advice fees.

I hope that helps and gives a feel for the productivity of your appointments.

Overall RMT received a 4.08 rating out of 5 and 50% of our IFAs gave either a 9 or 10 out of 10 when asked how likely they were to recommend to another IFA.

It might be Friday, but we are still working hard in the office on your behalf at the RMT Group. Introducing Steven Garbett who is our top telephone co-ordinator for making appointments to help people reduce their pension charges through IFA Direct Home.

The RMT Recruitment brand is part of the RMT Group helping source clients searching for a new career in the UK and overseas in the financial sector. Introducing Co-founder Jeff Bertrand at RMT Recruitment office who extends and assists the recruiting arm adding a competitive advantage by sourcing, recruiting and hiring top level talent for it’s clients.

We know who is BOSS at the RMT Group in the office… spot the coffee mug.

Ryan Mellor Co-founder of the RMT Group has been busy this week connecting with IFA’s across the UK to join us in business to business.

RMT Direct the web portal and registered trademark of RMT Group is ranked number #1 on Google UK for financial services leads.

IFA Direct Home Pension Appointments: Below is our average monthly size pension funds generated for over the past 26 months, together with numbers booked and the actual ‘sat’ rate. Our overall average pension pot size is £47,001. We have booked 2,378 appointments during this period. Our overall ‘sat rate’ average is 58% or 6 out of 10 appointments.

The high average pension fund obtained in June 2013 attributed to a much lower count. This is when this product was launched.

From October 2015, the newly enlarged call centre will be in operation and we anticipate volumes of booked appointments to increase by 50% to a monthly average of 200.

Month

Size of Pension Fund

No. Booked Appointments

Sat Rate

Jun-13

£95,075

8

50%

Jul-13

£31,333

12

60%

Aug-13

£52,738

19

80%

Sep-13

£59,583

30

62%

Oct-13

£35,068

50

58%

Nov-13

£57,176

106

63%

Dec-13

£29,843

40

52%

Jan-14

£46,355

51

64%

Feb-14

£36,655

94

56%

Mar-14

£32,943

61

38%

Apr-14

£47,282

80

53%

May-14

£51,959

82

65%

Jun-14

£55,816

91

70%

Jul-14

£41,147

90

61%

Aug-14

£58,533

78

61%

Sep-14

£45,801

138

59%

Oct-14

£40,541

147

52%

Nov-14

£44,931

151

49%

Dec-14

£42,974

80

65%

Jan-15

£42,634

115

62%

Feb-15

£48,124

139

66%

Mar-15

£45,918

166

57%

Apr-15

£36,364

153

52%

May-15

£49,492

115

53%

Jun-15

£47,661

167

49%

Jul-15

£46,087

115

60%

Average

£47,001

58%

Total

2,378

Ryan Mellor, Co-founder at RMT Direct

If you are a financial advisor and you would like to work with us, please visit RMT Direct.